Photograph by A. F . Sherman
IMMIGRANTS IN RAILWAY WAITING-ROOM : ELLIS ISLAND
Having passed muster with the doctor and the inspector at the nation's gate it has
swung open to these new arrivals, and now they are in free America, ready to journey
unhindered to their respective destinations.
peace whose economic opportunities will
have the same effect?
One searches the pages of history in
vain for a satisfactory answer. The his
tory of past wars throws no certain light
upon it. After our own Civil War, the
South, burdened with debts, wanted a
million things. But empty pocketbooks
and poor credit form a combination that
has little buying power. And so the
South, unable to solve its economic diffi
culties at once, had to sit by and see thou
sands of its people go into the North and
West to start over again. The end of
the Russo-Japanese War brought great
hordes of Russians to our shores, eco
nomic necessity impelling them to leave
their homelands.
The Franco - Prussian War, on the
other hand, sent only a normal number
of French people to America as one of
its aftermaths, and all the people who left
Europe following the Napoleonic wars
were fewer in number than those coming
here in a single three-months' period of
our normal immigration history.
There are those who say that the rea
son the South could not rebuild after the
Civil War was because it did not get the
support of the Federal Government-a
support which the governments of Eu
rope will give their people. They point
out that none of the warring nations,
however much they may owe, have bor
rowed as near to the margin of their
credit as many Latin-American countries,
and that people who would not buy their
war bonds will take their peace obliga
tions readily. They point to the experi
ence of Baltimore and San Francisco to
show how new prosperity and fresh re
sources can arise out of the ashes of
calamity.
SIX PANAMA CANALS A YEAR INTEREST
CHARGE
But the difference between an isolated
city and practically a whole continent is
too great for such an analogy to be sig-